Week 8

Culture and Material Evaluation

March 4th 

          Reading and reflecting on this week’s reading about text evaluation and how teachers are to approach this concept in class, the reading has some very important information and ideas of how to evaluate text and what to look for to represent students in our classroom. As future teachers we will need to consider and look closely in who and in what way are our students represented from the text that we are teaching from. In ch. 11 from Hinkel, it gave a list of the things to look at when evaluating a textbook. We need to take into consideration that a text can be a teacher, a map, a resource, a trainer, and authority, a de-skiller, and ideology. The text can be used for many things, but we also need to be creative and not really too my much in the textbook because we need to create critical thinkers of our students and look beyond what is written or pictures showed in text.

    Additionally, when it comes to the text that is being used we need to have many other texts that have a variety of images that represents our students. In the article by Taylor-Mendes, he discuss that teachers can also include students into culture discussion when questioning about the images that are used in the textbook and how they are represented. Creating critical questions and asking them what have they experience and how do people really look like besides in the textbook. He also discuss that this might be another good idea to bring and discuss as a class about culture, people, race, and stereotype using the textbook for class discussion about the topic.  

           
             Overall, as future ‘multicultural’ teachers we need to be very sensitive and careful how we evaluate text, what textbooks are representing, what are they informing, how are they being use or how will they be use, is it textbooks that will be helpful for my students’ understanding of culture and identity. Also, not only rely on textbook, but an aid for other information that will be connected together. Use textbooks as class discussion about images, stereotyping, and their true experience of how they look like and how they should be represented in textbook